for his keep!  This answer, so contrary to all the accepted usages of war, which reserve such payments till after the conclusion of peace, was no empty gibe; for when, some time before the preliminaries had been signed, the British and American commissioners met to effect an exchange of prisoners, the Americans began by claiming the immediate payment of what the British prisoners had cost them.  This of course broke up the meeting at once.  In the meantime the German prisoners in British pay were offered their freedom at eighty dollars a head.  Then farmers came forward to buy up these prisoners at this price.  But the farmers found competitors in the recruiting sergeants, who urged the Germans, with only too much truth, not to become ‘the slaves of farmers’ but to follow ’the glorious trade of war’ against their employers, the British government.  To their honour be it said, these Germans kept faith with the British, much to the surprise of the Americans, who, like many modern writers, could not understand that these foreign mercenaries took a professional pride in carrying out a sworn contract, even when it would pay them better to break it.  The British prisoners were not put up for sale in the same way.  But money sent to them had a habit of disappearing on the road—­one item mentioned by Carleton amounted to six thousand pounds.

If such was the happy lot of prisoners during the war, what was the wretched lot of Loyalists after the treaty of peace?  The words of one of the many petitions sent in to Carleton will suggest the answer.  ’If we have to encounter this inexpressible misfortune we beg consideration for our lives, fortunes, and property, and not by mere terms of treaty.’  What this means cannot be appreciated unless we fully realize how strong the spirit of hate and greed had grown, and why it had grown so strong.

The American Revolution had not been provoked by oppression, violence, and massacre.  The ’chains and slavery’ of revolutionary orators was only a figure of speech.  The real causes were constitutional and personal; and the actual crux of the question was one of payment for defence.  Of course there were many other causes at work.  The social, religious, and political grudges with which so many emigrants had left the mother country had not been forgotten and were now revived.  Commercial restrictions, however well they agreed with the spirit of the age, were galling to such keen traders.  And the mere difference between colonies and motherland had produced misunderstandings on both sides.  But the main provocative cause was Imperial taxation for local defence.  The Thirteen Colonies could not have held their own by land or sea, much less could they have conquered their French rivals, without the Imperial forces, which, indeed, had done by far the greater part of the fighting.  How was the cost to be shared between the mother country and themselves?  The colonies had not been asked to pay more than their share.